ReAL vs. LA

Last weekend Brad took me to my first ever professional soccer game. Actually, to be honest, I think it was the first time I ever sat through an entire soccer game of any level. Brad played in High School and sometimes with the Mexicans at the park in St. George, so he did his best to educate me about the specifics of soccer.




It was ReAL Salt Lake against the LA Galaxy, and lucky for us the stadium is only about 25 minutes away from where we live. You may recall that David Beckham plays for the LA Galaxy. (He's the only famous soccer player I know of, aside from Pele, whom I remember from a video in my 7th grade PE class.) I was hoping to run into Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham) in line for a Hot Dog but no such luck. David Beckham didn't even step a foot on the field, Brad said he was injured, but I say he has no excuse. Since I didn't see anyone famous to take pictures of I settled for this guy. What a character he was! I could tell he loved his job selling cotton candy.



But back to the game. We had great seats in the little ReAL section but the people around us weren't too lively. When ReAL made a goal Brad and I were the only ones to jump up and down and cheer. Brad would take the scarf from around my neck and wave it around, then kindly return it after the celebration. After the goal we realized there was a handful of ReAL fans in the section next to ours, and they must have noticed us too, because they called us over to come sit by them so we could "band together". It was mostly people from Salt Lake/Provo that lived here now. One guy brought all his friends from CA that didn't care for either team and dressed them up in his ReAL gear to make us look like we had more fans than we actually did. They were cracking me up. They would sit and talk and drink beer, then randomly one guy would stand up and yell at the top of his lungs "BEAT THE GALAXY!" then resume drinking his beer and talking to his friends. Here's our cheering section. Yeah, it's empty.



Here's the LA section right next to us. I guess that's what you get when you're the visiting team.


ReAL ended up losing by one goal, but we still had so much fun! We made some new fiends and enjoyed a change of pace.